Product Details
Hardcover
206 pages
University of Iowa Press
Published 1997
Amazon.com
This volume of essays deals with aspects of photography that have been neglected by John Wood's fellow historians. Although he has authored four previous books on the daguerreotype--the topic of numerous studies by other scholars--he addresses oversights of his own, and discusses the subject from a different vantage than that employed by his colleagues. In his essay on European pictorialism, he appraises the work of several undeservedly obscure masters of the craft, and disputes the nature of Alfred Stieglitz's legacy. Fewer than half of the 103 images used to illustrate the book are black and white; the distinctive half-tones are accompanied by dozens of full color daguerreotypes and blue duotone cyanotypes. The daguerreotypes are often startling, while the latter are delightfully surreal.
Card catalog description
Included in this seminal work are essays on the western American daguerreotype, contemporary daguerreotypy, the American autochrome, the art of the cyanotype, European pictorialism, and American symbolism in photography. Wood's fresh use of the diaries and journals of gold field miners and his penetrating vision of the near extermination of indigenous peoples - "the American holocaust" - enable him to contrast between the reality and the mythology manifested in the faces of the photographed... read more |
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